Halo 3 Causing Network Issues 306
Recently at my university where I'm a student and a sys admin, we have been experiencing some odd outages, in particular since the 25th of September. The outages seemed to occur between 8 PM and 12:00 AM — peak gaming hours for our dorms. It just happens that Halo 3 came out on the 25th of September. Upon further investigation we found that our network routers were shaping TCP packets, but not UDP. Once we applied UDP shaping as well, all network outages ceased. Gamers complained, but university students attempting to access network resources such as our UNIX clusters were satisfied.
Re:No sympathy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I must be new here (Score:5, Interesting)
It's uselessness lies in the fact that it was a mis configured router causing the problems, and configuring it right fixed it. 99% of people on
I'm not sure about the story part, though I guess any yarn told by an individual about an event qualifies.
Therefore the tale is a story, is remarkable, and is useless, ergo 'What a remarkably useless story'
Honestly this one irritates even me, and that's saying something. I'm usually fine with non-stories, as I'm bored enough to not care. Talking about how you didn't properly set up your university network and didn't prepare for the largest game release in history (I'm sorry, but if you're running a network for college kids, why in the world weren't you ready for Halo 3? You should know for a fact that it's going to be huge, if you don't then you're living in a cave) doesn't make me want to like you, and then mentioning that your response was basically to shut down the kids ability to play proudly, like 'Look at me, I'm so smart, I killed a bunch of kids fun because I couldn't think of any of the other hundred ways to solve my problem and would rather just shut them down', well that makes me want to punch you in the face for being dumb, and proud of that dumbness.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
- Halo 3's network protocol is so abysmal that it needs a big chunk of bandwidth. I'm not talking that everything must be done The Right Way (ie, sending just what other players pressed and a checksum of the game's state like Doom1/2 did), but even sending the coords for objects you can see won't take more than a few KBs per second.
- the routers were buggy and crapped out after seeing more than X streams, counting every UDP packet as a separate stream (a moderately popular bug). As shaping fixed the issue, I doubt this could be the culprit.
- the whole univ having nothing but a slow DSL uplink or so. I don't know where the article's poster is from, but if that's a 3rd world country it's possible.
Somehow, not knowing anything about Halo, I suspect a combination of the first and third reason.Ah, Doom (Score:5, Interesting)
id shortly thereafter patched the game not to use broadcast packets anymore. Once the cause of the network failures became apparent, playing the unpatched version of Doom became grounds for having your Intargopher turned off (we didn't call it the Intarweb back in those days, ya whippersnapper).
My school (Score:4, Interesting)
The internet in the dorms was shittacular. Horrible horrible service, and we had to pay 30$ a month for it.
And, the IT department, when called out on this bullshit, couldn't even give us a break down on how our money was being spent.
So, 3 years ago me and several friends sent an email out to everyone of importance around campus calling them out, basically saying it was bullcrap they advertise themselves as being all advanced at this university and having this gaming major, but the gaming major students can't even get online half the time in their dorms to play....games.
Within several hours, most faculty was writing back and agreeing with us. We showed up at a meeting, and the head of IT didn't have anything together at all.
Basically what happened was for a few months we could opt to be on a seperate network through the engineering department that wasn't managed by the IT department, but rather a professor in his spare time. And gasp, this network was far far superior and less buggy. It had 50% of the computers on campus on it, and 0% of the budget, yet still managed to be far more reliable.
Then, after the next quarter passed, we were allowed to get outside ISP service in the dorms. Alot of my friends get adelphia internet access. I just chose to move off campus, I was tired of dealing with it. You still had to pay the IT department for their crummy connection, on top of paying another ISP.
Re:Doubts (Score:3, Interesting)
And highly paid professionals should be a lot better educated than a group of kids, right? Oh well, whom am I kidding. But if you're writing a gaming library for millions of dollars, the library ought to handle at least the most common case when most players are close to each other well.
Re:I must be new here (Score:1, Interesting)
You don't get it do you? He got to yell "get off my lawn" and actually kick the kids off his lawn.
You might not believe me now, but someday you too will know the heady joy that comes from utterly despising children and ruining their fun.
Re:Doubts (Score:1, Interesting)
They used shaping to make the experience of non-gamers better, at the expense of throttling the gamers' traffic and making their experience worse.
One can argue about which is better use of the uni's resources, but you can never claim the issues were caused by "not shaping UDP", there is no requirement to shape anything to make your network work.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, how dare college students try to use the network for gaming.
Seriously though, this is something that A LOT of people miss. College students are living at the college 24/7 for at least 4, more if they go to grad school, years.
It's fine to say something like "No porn, games, file sharing, etc." at work or at a high school where business and education are the only things that should be happening. Why? Because the employees/students should go home and do those things on their own Internet connection.
But that doesn't work in a college. The students can't just go home to their own Internet connection, they're stuck at the university with the network available in the dorms. The universities need to buy more bandwidth instead of throttling the speed down to levels non-suitable for gaming. There will be a time in the near future where Internet bandwidth available to each user will be a large portion of the decision process for students applying to college. Right now I'm applying to about 5 different colleges that are 99% identical, if I'm accepted into all of them then I'm going to have to decide between them based on which one has the greenest trees, is closest to a bar, has the best cell phone coverage, and which one has the least amount of throttling on the Internet connections in the dorms.
Re:Doubts (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from the argument that the bandwidth is for educational use, trying to support gaming in our dorms would be a full-time job based on the number of calls and emails we get on a daily basis about it.
People use to be all "well that sucks, i'll get over it." Now I've got parents calling wondering why Johnny can't play his favorite MMO that he "really, really likes to play." I seriously thought that a guy that came to my office a few weeks ago was going to hit me because he couldn't play FFXI.
The worse part though, is when a group of students try to fake network problems in order for us to fix Johnny's issues, because, apparently, we don't monitor the network at all until 20 people on the same floor complain.
If they really need their fix, they are more than welcome to get a cable modem from the local cable company. I can't vouch for all Universities, but nobody here is forced to use our LAN.